And you should always make it your personal mission to destroy them for lying to us about their gender! Fucking liars! How dare they?
Verifying someones claims to education and work experience is standard for any reporter. If the simple stuff like education and work experience is fraudulent then it’s a huge red flag. Everything the reporter checked was lies. He did nothing more than any reporter does with a fraud. He told what he discovered. Everything that didn’t check out. Including the change in gender which I agree is the most trivial issue. Lying to investors about studying at MIT and having a defense dept background is much more important than what gender the person identifies as.
Heck just last year there was a con artist claiming linage to the Rockefeller family. They tracked him all the way back to his German family. That’s known as good investigative reporting.
I don’t think you could find anything, anything at all, that would make your statement above in any way true about this situation.
Which is why I don’t understand what it is that some people think this journalist did wrong. ESPECIALLY since as far as I can tell, Dr. V killed herself before it was published (and if we are to believe the editor, it would never have been published with only the details Hannan had prior to Dr. V’s suicide).
Her status made a chill run up his spine. He outed her to investors. She made it clear at the outset the story should be about the invention, not the inventor.
He’s a piece of shit.
Those who think that Dr. V killed herself because the reporter outed her as transgender seem to be making assumptions not supported by the facts. Are we sure that this was the reason, and not because she was being exposed as a fraud and a liar?
I don’t think the author should have mentioned the transgender angle, unless it directly pertained to research on things that mattered, for example if there was a male student who graduated from MIT who seemed a possible match for Dr. V but this couldn’t be definitely confirmed or refuted.
In a perfect world, the transgender angle could be matter-of-factly mentioned as an interesting detail, much as the “red hair” was mentioned. We don’t think that the writer is associating red heads with sordidness because of the passing reference. Alas, it’s not so simple with respect to being transgender. Simply by mentioning it, he’s creating a link in people’s mind with deception and depravity, because of the prejudices that exist in the world at large.
Having said that, I don’t think the author had evil intent. His article reads in a fairly compassionate manner, actually.
As a journalism major, I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t have been reported.
Rightly or wrongly, it is not within the power of individuals to dictate to journalists what story they will research.
Her gender transition was irrelevant to the story, and transgender people ABSOLUTELY have a right for that to remain private, which Essay Anne Vanderbilt clearly did. Oh, the story is all about this clever little asshole’s investigation and his shock and delight at outing this “troubled man.”
Piece of shit, he is.
Look, I’m not defending his decision to out Dr. V as transgender. But you point out that she asked the author to focus on “the invention, not the inventor” as if that were a reason his behavior was wrong.
But by that reasoning, he was wrong to research ANY aspect of the story that she told him to say away from. What if she wasn’t transgender, but she was lying about her credentials? Was he wrong to investigate, simply because she told him not to?
I think he was wrong to out her, but for other reasons. Anyone who consents to speak to a journalist and thinks s/he can control the story is sadly mistaken.
In point of fact, she was lying about her credentials - not just to the reporter but to the investor mentioned in the article.
The point at which she told that investor that she was a Vanderbilt - one of those Vanderbilts - and that her money and family connections were going to help make her golf club a success is the point at which her name and family background became central to the story. It’s also the point at which she became guilty of fraud.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect the reporter to drop the story when he finds out that she’s a criminal and conartist just because she’s transgendered - any more than he should drop the story for a non-transgendered person.
And while it’s possible that Vanderbilt killed herself because she was afraid of being outed, I don’t think there’s enough in the story to make that a certainty. It’s possible, for example, that she was worried about going to jail.
Reporter reported. It’s what they do.
Another thought - I don’t think her transgenderism is one of the lies that she told and I understand why people reading the article can get the impression that the reporter thought of it that way.
I’m saying that regardless of her stated wish to talk about the invention, not the inventor - the inventor did make quite a lot of statements about herself and raised money on the strength of them. It was reasonable to investigate those statements and, in the process, it was inevitable that the full story would come out especially after it became clear that her statements were criminally fraudulent.
I believe if they did speak up after her suicide, they would have said things he didn’t want to hear. And the initial interview was conducted with her under the condition that it was about the product, not her, so no surprise that her partner didn’t want to be interviewed at the start.
I’d suggest you read Una Persson’s recent thread in MPSIMS about her struggle to be accepted as being a trans woman and about feeling judged her entire life about how she looked, before and after transitioning. I’m not sure you realize how cruel those remarks are.
Because it has nothing to do with the story and leads to a culture that thinks of transgender people as “liars” and “dishonest” when it’s not at all true? It’s adding to an overall culture of toxicity.
Yes, bad person, but I respect the overall rights of privacy for bad people too - I’m against this in the same way I’m against paparazzi hounding celebrities constantly or banning neo-nazis from speaking freely. There’s been some cases of “journalists” thinking it’s important news to report someone as transgender and untrustworthy just because they’re a public figure, and it’s completely inappropriate.
So how should have the journalist have reported that Dr. V. was born under a different name, with a past that didn’t at all match what she was claiming? If she had been born biologically female Stephanie Krol, no one would be batting an eye about her entire past being revealed - it’s clearly very relevant to the story, especially when the subject of the story is trying to get investors, based on her non-existent past.
I think the Bill Simmons apology makes some pretty good points, mainly: they should have had someone from the transgendered community take a look at the article, the ending on the suicide was unnecessarily cold, and I think the idea to include more background about suicide and transgendered people was very much needed; and a couple other thoughts written there were well-considered, but too late.
There is one question maybe someone can help with – there was a criticism that the original article did not make proper use of pronouns. So far as I can tell, the article referred to Dr. V as “she” everywhere. What mistakes are the critics referring to?
But on the larger point: I don’t think the article treated Dr. V’s gender identity in a frivolous or titillating way. I think the mystery of why Dr. V did not exist before a certain point, despite the claims of Ivy League degrees and top secret government work, is a perfectly legitimate question for a reporter to answer, and part of that answer is that Dr. V used to be someone else who worked as a mechanic, etc.
What’s more, had the article been written to consciously exclude any reference to her gender identity, would the suicide make any sense whatsoever? As it stands, I think a reasonably well-read person could read the article and get the gist that the fact that Dr. V was a transgendered person and ended up committing suicide are somehow linked. As Bill Simmons said, this point could have been stressed even more to better inform the reader.
But if the transgender issue was omitted from the article, the story would be “crazy liar invents great club; dies.” It would literally be covering up a important part of the story that, if slightly better written, would have driven home an important lesson to the reader about what it means to be a transgendered person.
All in all, I think the article did not err in raising this issue, but as it is written I would give it a B- because it didn’t do enough justice to Dr. V’s death and why it probably happened. The story goes into more detail about trying to figure out if Dr. V worked on the stealth bomber; it should have included at least the same amount of time talking about transgendered people and the specific problems they face.
The Unnamed Louisiana Sheriff was Buford T. Justice of Texas. 
Actually, only 4-5 weeks after their last contact, [url=» The Dr. V Story: A Letter From the Editor]per the editor.
And he also states that the article wasn’t even in consideration to be printed - until after she killed herself. A work about a lying, scamming inventor isn’t that hot, but apparently a suicide is fan-fucking-tastic (and not worth much self-reflection prior to publication).
Dr. V had tried to commit suicide 6 years before the story was published. This was not a person bullied into a rash act, but rather a person with serious mental illness who was also a conman. Good journalists try to uncover truth and if that truth was ugly and messy than the fault lies with those who lied, cheated, and stole, not the journalist who uncovered the truth. The fact that people are trying to bully the writer because he told the truth is a sad state of affairs.